Mayflies famously live for just a day. But before that they can spend months or years as nymphs, gestating underwater until they’re ready to fly. This lopsided lifespan is the inspiration for Gus Gowland’s new musical, which imagines a relationship that’s long in the making but quick to burn out.
Protagonists May and Fly meet through a dating app. A fumbled start turns into real connection. But instead of meeting in person, they decide to wait, leaving it almost two years before their first date. Gowland’s show moves back and forth between the couple’s tender online interactions and their final, fateful get-together, as reality struggles to live up to expectations.
The comparison that immediately comes to mind is with Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years, which simultaneously tells the story of a relationship forwards and backwards. There’s a similar pathos here, as moments of hopeful affection are juxtaposed with crushing awkwardness. The contrast is amplified by Tania Azevedo’s direction. Chatting online, May and Fly are placed on opposite sides of TK Hay’s elegant set, physically distant yet emotionally close. Face to face in a hotel room, it’s as though the claustrophobic, fleshy reality of it all is too much.
The question of where we are our true selves, online or offline, is an interesting one. Its exploration, though, is rather thin, and the stark disparity between the couple’s virtual and in-person dynamic strains plausibility. The music, rather than the dialogue, does the more effective storytelling. Aptly, it’s the solo numbers that convey the most genuine, raw emotion – as though these two characters can never quite get in sync. In Looking Back, we glimpse Fly’s constant need to move on, while there’s something devastating about Running on Empty, May’s catalogue of relationship failures.
Besides its structure, Mayflies’ other innovation is its use of three actors (Nuno Queimado, Rumi Sutton and Emma Thornett) alternating in the two roles on different nights, with the characters written to be played by performers of any gender. Again, this is intriguing, but feels like a case of concept over content. While the container is ingenious, its substance is lacking.
At York Theatre Royal until 13 May
